Students, either working alone or in a group of up to four people, will create an online project that synthesizes information and provides some analysis about an aspect of Rock & Roll history. Although you can develop your project using any digital resource that is appropriate for your research and that you are comfortable using (Omeka, WordPress, HistoryPin, Timeline JS, etc.), this should explicitly NOT be putting an essay on a webpage. For whatever you develop, there should be clear reasons that this should be presented digitally and it should not duplicate a resource already online.
Past Digital History Projects
Digital History Project Guidelines
- Student(s) must meet with instructor to discuss ideas, sources, plans, and timelines for digital history project.
- Topic covers a period of rock & roll history in a digitally original and unique manner.
- Project makes inventive and creative use of digital technologies, tools, designs.
- Project is visually appealing and easy to follow.
- Project includes evidence gathered from traditional sources (books, articles, archives) and when appropriate online sources (google news database, reliable websites, digital archives.
- Project contains at least one narrative page (or entry) that provides original analysis of what your history project demonstrates or reveals about the subject.
- Project adequately develops and provides evidence for its argument.
- Project contains an “About” page where your name(s), the date the project was completed, and the steps taken to complete the project are discussed.
- The “About” page for a group project clearly indicates what parts of the project were worked on/completed by which group members.
- All text is original, spelled correctly, and grammatically correct.
- Project images are legally usable through creative commons licensing (See: Using Creative Commons Media).
- All primary and secondary sources used in the project (or used in researching the project) are cited using Turabian/Chicago Manual of Style.
Digital History Project Resources
- DiRT – a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.
Research
- Google Ngram Viewer – When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years.
- Octoparse – Windows program that quickly scrapes web data without coding and turns web pages into excel spread sheets.
- Touchgraph SEO – TouchGraph SEO Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites.
Analysis
- SongSim – visualize patterns of repetition in text.
- Voyant Tools – Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.
- WordClouds – Wordclouds.com is a free online word cloud generator and tag cloud creator. Paste text, upload a document or open an URL to automatically generate a word- or tag cloud.
- Word Count Tool – a word counter that provides an extensive statistics about the word count, character count, the number of characters without spaces… This tool also reports the number of syllables, monosyllabic words, polysyllabic words, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, short words, and long words.
Presentation
- Google Maps – Google Maps allows users to place pin markers, draw shapes and lines, and embed descriptions to create history-based maps. Images, videos, and links can also be added to each marker. Allowing collaboration and the importation of information, Google Maps is ideal for group projects. (Example: Mapping Music)
- Historypin – Collections bring together content around a particular topic or theme. You can explore the Collections or create a Collection of your own. Tours lead you step-by-step through a series of pieces of content, telling a story, exploring a place or walking through time. (Example: People’s History of Pop)
- Image Map Tool – Image Map Tool allows you to upload an image (or specify the URL of an image found online) and turn it into a clickable image map.
- JuxtaposeJS – Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events.
- myHistro – Using myHistro, you can combine maps and timelines seamlessly into one great presentation. Completed timelines can be embedded into your blog and websites for maximum exposure. (Example: Olympic Games)
- Shanti InterActive – This is a suite of tools that make it easy to create highly interactive web-based visualizations, videos, and maps.
- StoryMapJS – StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in our development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool.
- Timeline – TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually,rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet. (Example: Musical Movement)
- Wix – Wix makes it possible for everyone to create a website for free. (Example: A Comparison of Christian and Mainstream Music)
- WordPress – WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. (Example: Techno Music)
Rock Music Informational Repositories
- AllMusic – is an in-depth resource for finding out more about the albums, bands, and musicians.
- American Music Awards Winners – American Music Awards nominees are based on key fan interactions as reflected in Billboard Magazine and on Billboard.com.
- Billboard Charts Archive – a host of charts that are individually or collectively based on key fan interactions with music, including album sales and downloads, track downloads, radio airplay and touring as well as streaming and social media interactions.
- Blossom Music Center Concert Database – a database to find dates and artists for each show at Blossom Music Center, the outdoor concert venue that opened in 1968 between Cleveland and Akron.
- Data.world – includes open data about music contributed by users and organizations across the world.
- Discogs – a site with discographies of all labels, all artists, all cross-referenced, with an international marketplace built off of that database.
- Encyclopaedia Metallum – large database focusing on heavy metal bands.
- Freedb – is a database of compact disc track listings.
- Grammy Awards – celebrates artistic excellence through music’s only peer-recognized accolade.
- IMVDb – is a database of music video information.
- Kaggle – provides data sets for download and analysis.
- LyricWiki – a free wiki website which lists reliable lyrics for any song by any artist.
- MusicBrainz Database – relational database engine that includes information about artists, release groups, releases, recordings, works, and labels, as well as the many relationships between them.
- MusicMatch – lyrics platform – where you can search lyrics from any track, anywhere in the world.
- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – inductee information.
- Rock’s Backpages – a list of all free articles in the Rock’s Backpages library of classic articles on musical artists over the last 50 years.
- Songkick – this database contains the dates and venues of current and many past live musical performances.
- Sweet Soundtrack – song listings from thousands of your favorite movies, searchable by movie and artist.
- Top 40 Database Music Service – Lists Top 40 songs and artists for years 1958-2014.
- Ultimate Music Database – includes single and album databases from 1940 to 2018.
- Who Sampled – Discover the connections among over 525,000 songs and 205,000 artists, from Hip-Hop, Rap, R&B, and more.